They looked at me as if they were Martians newly landed.
“Go on!” I said, gently but firmly.
They stood up. Driss and Karine disappeared into the bedroom.
“What are we going to do?” Jasmine asked. She was starting to recover. Of the four, she was the strongest. You could see that in every precise, self-assured gesture. She may have smoked as much as the others, but it was obvious she’d drunk less.
“Get this one back on his feet,” I replied, indicating Kader.
I lifted him from his chair.
“He won’t fuck with us anymore, right?” he said, laughing. “We fucked his ass, the jerk.”
“Where’s the bathroom?”
She pointed at the door. I pushed Kader inside. There was a very small tub. The room smelled of vomit. Driss had already been in here. I grabbed Kader by the neck and forced him to lower his head. I opened the cold water faucet. He struggled.
“Don’t mess me around, or I’ll throw you in!”
I rinsed his head thoroughly, and wiped him with a towel. By the time we came back to the living room, the coffee was ready. We sat around the table. In the bedroom, Karine was still crying, and Driss was talking to her. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but it was like soft music.
“Shit!” I said to Kader and Jasmine. “You could have called me!”
“We didn’t mean to kill him,” Kader replied.
“What were you expecting? That he’d apologize? He was the kind of guy who’d have slit his own mother’s throat.”
“We could see that,” Jasmine said. “He threatened us. With a gun.”
“Who hit him?”
“Karine, first. With the ashtray.”
A big glass ashtray, which I’d been filling with cigarette butts since I arrived. The impact had knocked Toni to the floor. He’d let go of his gun. Jasmine had kicked it under the wardrobe. It was still there. Toni had rolled over onto his stomach and tried to get up. Driss had jumped on him and taken him by the throat, crying, “Bastard! Bastard!”
“Kill him!” the others yelled. Driss squeezed with all his might, but Toni kept struggling. Karine was screaming, “He’s my brother!” She wept and implored and pulled Driss by the arm, to get him to let go. But Driss wasn’t there anymore. He was letting out all his rage. Leila wasn’t only his sister. She was his mother. She’d raised him, pampered him, loved him. They couldn’t do that to him. Take away both of the mothers he’d known in his life.
His hours of training with Mavros were paying off.
With a loser like Sanchez—or with a gun in his hand—Toni was a winner. But in this case, he didn’t stand a chance. He knew it as soon as he felt Driss’s hands on his throat, squeezing. Toni’s eyes begged for mercy. His pals hadn’t taught him about this. Death gradually seeping into his body. The absence of oxygen. The panic. The fear. I’d had a taste of all that the other night. Driss was easily as strong as Muscles. No, I wouldn’t have liked to die like that.
Karine still clung weakly to Driss. She’d stopped shouting. She was sobbing now, and saying, “No, no, no.” But it was too late. Too late for Leila, who she loved. Too late for Toni, who she loved. Too late for Driss, who she loved even more than Leila or Toni. Driss had stopped hearing anything. Not even Jasmine crying, “Stop!” He was still squeezing, with his eyes closed.
Was Leila smiling at Driss? Was she laughing, like the day she and I decided to go swimming at Sugitton? We’d left the car on a flat area of the Ginestre pass, and had taken a path through the Puget massif to reach the Gardiole pass. Leila wanted to see the sea from the top of the Devenson cliffs. She’d never been there before. It was one of the most beautiful places in the world.
Leila was walking ahead of me. She was wearing fringed denim shorts and a white sleeveless top. She’d pulled her hair back under a white cotton cap. There were beads of sweat running down her neck. At moments, they glistened like diamonds. I’d been watching as the sweat went inside her top and down the hollow of her back as far as her waist. Her buttocks swayed.
She was pressing forward with all the ardor of youth. I saw the way the muscles of her lower legs tensed as she moved. She was as graceful climbing in the hills as she was walking on the street in high heels. I was overcome with desire for her. It was early, but the heat had already released the strong resinous odor of the pines. I imagined that resin smell between Leila’s thighs. The taste it might have on my tongue. At that moment, I knew I was going to put my hands on her buttocks. She’d have stopped walking. I’d have held her tight against me. Her breasts in my hands. Then I’d have stroked her stomach and unbuttoned her shorts.
I’d stopped walking. Leila turned and smiled.
“I want to walk in front,” I said.
As I passed her, she patted me on the ass, and laughed.
“What are you laughing at?”
“You.”
Happiness. One day. Ten thousand years ago.
Later, on the beach, she’d asked me about my life, the women in my life. I’ve never been able to talk about the women I’ve loved. I wanted those loves to stay intact inside me. Talking about them brought back the screaming matches, the tears, the slammed doors. And the nights that followed, the bedsheets as rumpled as my heart. I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to preserve the best part of those loves. The beauty of the first glance. The passion of the first night. The tenderness of the first awakening. I’d answered vaguely, as vaguely as I could.
Leila had looked at me strangely. Then she’d talked about her lovers. She could count them on the fingers of one hand. The description she gave me of the man of her dreams and what she expected of him turned into a fully-fledged portrait. It scared me. It wasn’t a portrait I liked. I wasn’t that man. Neither was anyone. I told her she was just a shallow teenager. That amused her at first, then made her angry. For the first time, we quarreled. A quarrel exacerbated by the desire we both felt.
We dropped the subject, and walked back in silence. We’d both put away, somewhere inside us, our desire for each other. We’d have to answer its call one day, but this wasn’t the day. The pleasure of being together, and getting to know each other, was more important. We knew that. The rest could wait. Just before we reached the car, she slipped her hand in mine. Leila was a fantastic girl. Before we said goodbye that Sunday, she kissed me on the cheek. “You’re a great guy, Fabio.”
Leila was smiling at me.
I saw her at last. On the other side of death. The men who’d raped and killed her were dead. The ants could do what they wanted with her corpse. Leila was untouchable. She was in my heart now, and I’d carry her with me always, on this earth that every day gives men a chance.
Yes, she must have been smiling at Driss at that moment. I knew I’d have killed Toni. To wipe out the horror. With my bare hands, like Driss, and just as blindly. Until the shit he’d been responsible for had risen to his throat and choked him.
Toni pissed on him. Driss opened his eyes, but didn’t take his hands from Toni’s neck. Toni had a glimpse of hell. The black hole. He struggled one last time. His body jerked. His last breath. Then he stopped moving.
Karine stopped crying. Driss straightened up. His arms dropped to his sides, over Toni’s body. They didn’t dare move or speak. Their hatred had gone. They were drained. They didn’t even realize what Driss had just done. What they’d let him do. They couldn’t accept that they’d just killed a man.
“Is he dead?” Driss asked at last.
Nobody replied. Driss retched, and ran to the bathroom. That was an hour ago, and since then, they’d been getting drunk and smoking joints. From time to time, they looked at the body. Kader stood up, opened the French door to the balcony, rolled Toni’s body outside with his foot, just to get him out of sight, and closed the door.
Every time they were on the point of calling me, one of them would suggest
something else. But each suggestion meant touching the body, and they didn’t dare do that. They didn’t even dare go out on the balcony. Three quarters of a bottle of scotch and quite a few joints later, they considered setting fire to the place and getting the hell out. That gave them a fit of the giggles, which felt good. It was then that I knocked at the door.
The telephone rang. Just like in a bad TV episode. Nobody moved. They looked at me, waiting for me to make a decision. In the bedroom, Driss had stopped talking.
“Shouldn’t we answer?” Kader asked.
Quickly, nervously, I picked up the phone.
“Toni?” A woman’s voice, sensual, husky, warm, arousing.
“Who’s that?”
Silence. I could hear the sound of plates and forks. Schmaltzy music in the background. A restaurant. Les Restanques? Maybe it was Simone.
“Hello.” A man’s voice, with a slight Corsican accent. Emile? Joseph? “Is Toni there? Or his sister?”
“Can I take a message?”
They hung up.
“Did Karine call Toni this evening?”
“Yes,” Jasmine replied. “To get him here. She said it was urgent. There’s a number she uses to contact him. She leaves a message, and he calls back.”
I went into the bedroom. They were lying side by side. Karine had stopped crying, and Driss had fallen asleep holding her hand. They looked adorable. I wished they could go through life with the same tender abandon.
Karine’s eyes were wide open and wild. She was still in hell. There was a song by Barbara—I couldn’t remember which one—in which she sang: It’s better to live in hell than to be dead in paradise. Or something like that. Which did Karine want at that moment?
“What’s the number you used to call Toni earlier?” I asked in a low voice.
“Who just called?”
“Friends of your brother, I think.”
A look of fear came into her eyes. “Are they coming here?”
I shook my head. “Don’t worry,” I said. “Do you know them?”
“Two of them. One really evil-looking, the other tall and well built. Military kind of guy. In fact, they’re both really evil-looking. The military guy has these weird eyes.”
Morvan and Wepler.
“Have you seen them often?”
“Just once. But I can’t forget them. I was having a drink with Toni on the terrace of the Bar de l’Hotel de Ville. They came and sat down at our table, didn’t ask if we minded. The military guy said, ‘She’s cute, your sister.’ I didn’t like the way he said it. Or the way he looked at me.”
“How about Toni?”
“He laughed, but I think he felt uncomfortable. ‘We have to talk business,’ he said to me. That meant I had to split. He didn’t even dare kiss me. ‘I’ll call you,’ he said. I could feel the other one looking at me as I walked away. I felt ashamed.”
“When was that?”
“Last week. Wednesday, at noon. The day Leila gained her master’s. What’s going to happen now?”
Driss had let go of Karine’s hand and turned over. He was snoring slightly. From time to time, a small tremor shook his body. I felt bad for him. For all of them. They’d have to live with this nightmare. Could they do it? Karine and Driss? Kader and Jasmine? I had to help them, to free them from the terrible images that would haunt their nights. I had to do it fast. For Driss, first of all.
“What’s going to happen now?” Karine repeated.
“We have to get out of here. Where do your parents live?”
“In Gardanne.”
It wasn’t far from Aix. The last surviving mining town in the region. Doomed, like all the men working there.
“Is that where your father works?”
“They fired him two years ago. He’s active in the CGT Defense Committee.”
“Do you get on OK with them?”
She shrugged. “They never noticed me growing up. Or Toni. Their idea of educating us was to build a better world. My father...” She paused for thought. “When you’ve suffered a lot, had to count every sou, that’s all you see of life. All you think about is changing it. It was an obsession. Toni might have understood, I think. But instead of just saying, ‘Sorry, I can’t buy you a moped,’ my father would make a speech. Tell him he hadn’t had a moped when he was that age. Tell him there were more important things in life than mopeds. A whole big scene. It was always the same. Whether it was about clothes, pocket money, cars. My father would give a speech. The workers, the capitalists, the Party.
“The third time the cops came to the house, my father threw Toni out. After that, I don’t know what became of him. No, that’s not true, I do know. And I didn’t like what became of him. The people he saw. The things he said about Arabs. I don’t know if he really thought that way. Or if it was...”
“And Leila?”
“I wanted him to meet my friends, to get to know other people. Jasmine, Leila. They’d met once or twice. Kader and Kriss too. And a few others. I invited him to my birthday party last month. He liked Leila. You know how it is. You dance, you drink, you talk, you flirt. He and Leila talked a lot that night. I’m sure he wanted to sleep with her. But Leila didn’t want it. She crashed here, with Driss.
“He saw her again after that. Four or five times, I think. In Aix. A drink on a terrace, a meal, a movie. It didn’t go any farther than that. Leila was doing it for me, I think, more than for him. She didn’t really like Toni. I’d told her a lot about him. Told her he wasn’t what he seemed. I pushed them together. I told myself she could change him. I couldn’t. I wanted a brother I wouldn’t be ashamed of. A brother I could have loved. Like Kader and Driss.” Her eyes moved off into the distance—towards Leila, and Toni—then came back to me. “I know she loved you. She often talked about you.
“She wanted to call you. After her master’s. She was sure she was going to get it. She wanted to see you again. ‘I can do it now,’ she said to me. ‘Now that I’m a big girl.’”
Karine laughed, then her eyes filled with tears again and she huddled against me.
“It’s all right,” I said. “It’s going to be fine.”
“I don’t understand any of what’s happened.”
We’d never know the truth. All there could ever be was speculation. The truth was part of the horror. I supposed Toni had been seen with Leila in Aix. By one of the gang. Probably by one of the worst of them. Morvan or Wepler. White suprematists, guys who believed in ethnic cleansing and final solutions. They must have put Toni to the test. Like an initiation. To move him up a level.
The paras liked that kind of crazy stunt. Fuck a guy from the next room. Go to the Legionnaires’ bar, kill one, and bring back his képi as a trophy. Kill a teenager who looked like a fag. They’d signed a pact with death. Life was cheap. Their own and everyone else’s. Particularly everyone else’s. In Djibouti, I’d come across even bigger maniacs. They’d go to the neighborhood around the former Place Rimbaud and find a hooker. Leave her for dead, with her throat cut. Mutilated, sometimes.
Now, our former colonies were here. Capital: Marseilles. Here, like there, life didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was death. And violent sex. It was a way to express your hatred of being nothing but a ghost waiting to fight. The unknown soldier of the future. One day or another. In Africa, Asia, the Middle East. Or even two hours from home. Wherever the West was threatened. Wherever there were foreigners hungry to fuck our women, our pure white women, and soil our race.
That was what they must have asked Toni to do. Bring them the Arab girl, so that they could fuck her. One after the other. Toni first. He must have been the first. He wanted her, and he was angry because she’d rejected him. A woman was just a piece of ass. They were all whores. Arab girls had whores’ asses. Like those Jewish bitches. Jewish girls’ asses were higher and rounder. Arab girls’ asses were a bit low
er, right? Black girls too. Black girls’ asses, you’re telling me! Really worth the effort!
Then the other two had had their turn. Not Morvan, or Wepler. No, the other two apprentice Nazis. The two who’d died on Place de l’Opéra. I don’t suppose they’d been up to it, when the time came to kill Leila. Fucking an Arab girl was one thing. Shooting her down without your hand shaking couldn’t have been so easy.
Morvan and Wepler were voyeurs. That’s what I imagined. They were the MCs. Had they jerked each other off as they watched? Or had they fucked each other afterwards, nostalgic for the SS and the virile love of warriors? And when had they decided that whoever survived that night would be the one who put his bullet closest to Leila’s heart?
Had Toni felt any pity for Leila as he fucked her? For a moment at least. Before he too fell headlong into the horror of it all. Into what could never be undone.
I recognized Simone’s voice. And she recognized mine. The number where Karine had left messages for her brother was indeed Les Restanques. She’d called him there this evening.
“I’d like to speak with Emile. Or Joseph.”
The same nauseating music. Caravalli and his magic violins, or some crap like that. But not so many noises of plates and forks. Les Restanques was emptying. It was ten before midnight.
“Émile,” the voice said. The same voice as before.
“Montale. No need to draw you a picture, you know who I am.”
“I’m listening.”
“I’m coming over there. I want to talk. A truce. I want to make you an offer.”
I had no plan. The only thing I wanted was to kill them all. I knew it was a fantasy, but it was what I needed to keep going, to do what had to be done. To move forward. To survive another hour, another century.
“Are you coming alone?”
“I haven’t been able to raise an army yet.”
“Where’s Toni?”
“He swallowed his tongue.”
“You’d better have a good excuse. Because to us you’re already dead.”
“Idle talk, Émile. Kill me, and you’ll all be collared. I’ve sold the story to a newspaper.”
Total Chaos Page 21
